| Thanks for the lj nudges - obviously, they've been necessary (and successful!).
I'm in the midst of packing and listening to a great thunderstorm - our first in quite a while, weeks! Given that I have to get more work done, pack, and be out of my apartment by 8am tomorrow, I don't have much time... but here are a few reasons why things have been too busy:
1) I'm writing my first publishable paper! Well, in theory I am... but I'm the only one working on the research, and the only one writing it (for now), with only a few tips and useful guiding questions from my adviser. As The Onion has pointed out, science is hard. Ug. It's fun, but I haven't made a single deadline yet. Things just.... happen. Slowly. Still, it's making me happy to be at Purdue, and satisfied with my work. So that's a win.
2) I'm buying a house! In theory. It's been a long and painful process - one that has become more strange and complex than my realtor claims ever to have seen in her 25-year career. It has also become very expensive, and will end up costing me about 40% more up front than we expected initially. But, I should be able to afford closing costs (just *barely*). At which point things should get much easier. The happy tax rebates for first-time homebuyers are wonderful, wonderful things. And since the house is a duplex, with one half currently rented out through the winter, I'll have a guaranteed source of additional income for the next 6 months at least.
The best part is that I will live across the street from a shaded lane and the county library, instead of a seedy tavern and the liquor store. And I will have a yard, in which to practice all the food-growing, permaculture-y, green-neo-hippy things I've been learning! Well, maybe next year, it's getting a little late for that now.
3) All of the above (combined with the constant social drama which is apparently now a fixture in my life) has been driving me completely nuts... so when a friend suggested a 3-day camping trip to a no-stress, clothing optional hippy music festival in the woods of Ohio, I said hell yes and signed up for my first vacation days since I started Purdue. So, packing, and then no work for 3 days. It will be glorious.
Anyhoo... that's what's up. I'll try to keep in touch! | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment   |
| Here's another digression/exploration/thoughts from my adventures last week - this time thinking about the simultaneous success of the environmental movement to increase our awareness of the natural world and the tiny-and-shrinking amount of exposure to that world that we humans (err, Americans/Westerners, I guess) actually get.
This one and my previous post I've also put up on my facebook page for broader readership, for those of you who use that crackhouse of social networking. :)
| | comments: Leave a comment |
| I am finally back in town after about 8 days on the move. It's all been a busy but invigorating and reaffirming vacation from the office and my disaster area of an apartment (still waiting on the exterminator and the plumber... again...).
From last Sunday to Friday I was at Turkey Run State Park here in Indiana, where I found the best scenery I've seen so far in the midwest. A beautiful, rugged place, under the best weather I've encountered in at least a year - sunny, low 80s, and breezy for 6 straight days. The "conference"/seminar/thing, the Byron Fellowship (www.byronfellowship.org/), was an unusual and delightful experience. With ~20 other participants (ranging from a college sophomore to a mid-70s chemical engineer-turned-semiconservative environmental activist), we hiked with geologists and botanists, practiced drawing and photography, heard talks on the "Creation Care" movement within Christianity, arctic water pollution, and sustainable urban development, and spent many many hours talking after dark in a teepee that we set up ourselves. I have enough thoughts, notes and bits of conversations in my head and on paper that it will take an awhile to unpack it all, but I'm going to try to write up an exploration of an idea each day for the next week or so, and see where that takes me. I'll be crossposting most of these on Facebook. The goal here is not to lecture, essay, or even inform - I really want to start a conversation or dialogue with anyone. So please - comment if you're interested, or have thoughts on what's behind the cut!
| | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Um, just a warning: this post makes me sound like a total loser. Be forewarned.
You know, it would be nice for life to slow down just enough, for just long enough, to feel like I had a handle on things. For more than 15 minutes. Please?
Seriously, people. God? Fate? Whoever you are, will the strings please stop jerking?
I was all prepped for a peppy post on post-finals... I've run out of p-words. Or brainpower. Anyway, I had all of my 3 finals today, which means that I'm officially done with coursework for my first year of graduate school (almost). w00t. And so far as I know, I didn't fail anything. More w00t. (w00t > cowbell?)
This semester has, much like the last one, seriously kicked my ass. While my grades are definitely better than as an undergrad (last semester, anyway... we'll see about this one), I've stopped exercising, lost sleep, haven't been cooking as well, had virtually no social time, and increased my coffee intake from 3 cups a week to 3 cups a day. Yowch. But if you forget the fact that I don't have a thesis or committee picked out yet, school is going really well!
I have this nagging feeling I'm not getting the life/school balance I was striving for.
Anyway. So I was all set to write this LJ post about "Hey, look! I finally finished the semester, and things are lookin' good! Yay!" The delusion lasted about 15 minutes, long enough to text my mom, bike home and check my email. Turns out my, hmm, 'girl of interest'(?) decided that the interest was no longer mutual. What goes around comes around I guess, and that puts me on both ends of a breakup this spring. Still... damn. What keeps bugging me is that, yes, I know I've been a really, truly shitty friend/boyfriend/whatever during the last few weeks; well, okay, not that bad, but not the kind of person I'd want to date. But seriously, I didn't keep it a secret that I was not my usual self; why call it quits right when things are about to improve?
Argh. Well, we'll see what happens, I suppose. More evidence that I need to work on this "social life" people talk about. I hear rumors you need a certain skill set for it, though.
/endbitchmoan
In other news (relinked from several other sources), I would almost be gay for this man (almost): www.youtube.com/watch
And am I the only one who didn't hear about this until a few days ago? I haven't seen it yet, but it looks definitely worth seeing for free: thehuntforgollum.s3.amazonaws.com/film.htm
| | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| I'm still having trouble realizing that last night wasn't just a dream... and unfortunately, I don't mean that in the romantic/innuendo sort of way. I'd actually managed to get to relax last night and get to bed early - a first in... over a month, I think - but I gradually woke up around 3:45 am to an odd but familiar sound. My doorknob was moving.
Now, my front door has some issues. The doorknob is actually completely useless, except as a conversation piece. The door was kicked in by a previous tenant's friends, destroying the woodwork and the latch. Since the door, frame, and latch are all over 150 years old, there aren't replacement parts. Certainly not at Walmart, or the hardware store down the street. This is a mixed blessing. It means that the only working mechanism on the door is a heavy-duty, new-ish deadbolt, which is nicely bolted into the very sturdy solid wood frame. It also means that it isn't possible for me to leave the apartment unlocked (also a good thing in my neighborhood), but that because of the damage to the lower part of the door/frame, the door always looks ajar if you just glance down at the knob. Which is where I, and most people, tend to look.
Anyway, even though the knob has no functional latch, it's still a convenient place to push/pull on the door. So I know what it sounds like. And that wasn't a sound I expected to hear at 3:45 am. People come and go at all hours from my downstairs neighbor's apt, but I convinced myself that, no, this wasn't the front door, or his door; this was coming from my door.
Next I made a series of back-and-forth mental leaps (linear thought isn't possible for me at that hour); I should just stay in bed. I should open the door with a kitchen knife in one hand; I should call the police; I should listen and wait it out; I should make some coffee (wait, what?!?). I went with the 'listen and learn strategy'. There were no sounds other than the doorknob. That was weird. Really weird. Eventually there were some other heavy, body-related noises (okay, so not a ghost... one less thing to worry about...). Getting out of bed, I stalked to my door and determined that someone was slumped on the other side of it, apparently just grabbing at the doorknob.
Some questioning revealed that this person was extremely drunk, named Sammy, and looking for his friends. I told him that he was in the wrong house, and that I wouldn't allow him to continue trying (uselessly) to open my door. After several minutes, I heard him stumble down the stairs and out the front door. I went back to bed.
Repeat. Again, the odd noises, the waking up (not so slowly this time), the wonder what the HELL was going on. We had another little exchange, . "I wanna see my friends!" "Your friends don't live here." "Can I come in?" "No." "You're not gonna let me in?" "No." ... more doorknob fondling ... "You need to leave, Sammy, this isn't your house." "Let me in!" "No, Sammy, you can't come in, this isn't your house." All the while, I thought extensively about exactly what I would do if he made a more forceful attempt to enter; where should I stand so that I could see him easily, but not be obvious myself, or get hit by the door? Do I respond by more forcefully trying to get him out? My apartment isn't really big enough to hide/run in. What if he comes at me with a right/left/kick/knife?
Thankfully, none of the worries were useful. It took longer this time (long enough for me to get my cell phone and look up the local number for the police station), but he eventually got back down the stairs.
I found my wooden training knife, set it next to the bed, and (eventually) went back to sleep. This morning I found a pen, a pair of socks, and a debit card on the floor in front of my door. His name really was Sam.
Yikes.
In other news, school is trying its damnedest to qualify as "hell" and I have no thesis topic and little sleep, but my adviser is cool, spring is finally arrived, and it looks like I'll survive an unusually drama-filled couple of months.
Anyway, that story took longer to retell than I expected, and I must be off... but there will be some more boring life-updates soon. Just you wait. | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| Ack - thanks for the lj nudge, I apparently need it sometimes.
Some quick notes:
I fail - utterly, completely fail - at not overworking myself. I've added another class, which puts me at not-enough-hours-in-the-week for my regular deadlines. Not good. Learning a lot, but I'm not sure how much I'll retain.
Watchmen was great. I'll definitely give it that. An incredibly, painstakingly accurate adaptation of the comic - in all of its glory, intrigue, and above all, brutality. I lost count of how many times I turned away from the screen for the gore and shattered bones, but probably five or six. But the characters were wonderfully played, and the scenes were brilliantly shot straight from the pages. The director may not have been creative, but he appreciated the brilliance of the work he imitated. I'd definitely like to see it again, maybe in a few weeks.
( A longer note ) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I promised y'all I'd let you know what I'm up to these days, and since I'm still waiting for my dinner to finish (slow cookers are awesome, but one should really start these things ahead of time... five hours for stew is a long time!), and don't have the energy to do any of the several dozen pages of reading I assigned myself I'm just gonna call this a run-on sentence right here and abandon it.
After a grad school search of epic proportions last winter, I decided to attend Purdue's new Ph.D. program in 'Ecological Sciences and Engineering'. It's an interdisciplinary program without a department, so I'm considered to be in whatever department my major professor is in - in my case, Agricultural and Biological Engineering. What do I do, exactly? Well... that's hard to say. Since I'm in "engineering" or some crap, we don't do laboratory rotations like a straight science program would. Instead I picked an adviser based on what I knew of the research here beforehand, and I'm assumed to be doing my thesis work with them unless I explicitly change my mind.
My first semester was entirely coursework (7 classes! Why?!), so this spring I'm starting my first "real" projects. I put real in quotation marks because I'm still not actually sure either of my current efforts will have anything directly to do with my thesis. Basically, I came to Purdue assuming that I would put my degree in biochem & molecular bio to work engineering microbes to sustainably produce useful things - like fuel. My adviser leads one of the nation's most effective cellulosic ethanol research laboratories, using yeast to turn woody plant material into ethanol. The lab here has contracts with several major chemical and energy companies, and the technology appears very close to industrial-scale use out in the 'real world'.
But in my coursework, I've learned quite a bit about sustainable development, life-cycle analysis, climate change, and water resources management. Making ethanol with yeast no longer seems like a good idea - the source materials (feedstocks) most commonly used for cellulosic ethanol are corn stalks, soy, and (to a lesser extent) switchgrass. Indiana is very, very much a corn state. And nothing seems like a worse idea than growing more corn. The energy, petroleum, and water costs for all the necessary fertilizer are just staggering, and the pollution from agricultural runoff destroys the natural ecology of the waterways. I've only just realized how significant all these problems really are - there is a lot of evidence to way on both sides - and I still think that cellulosic ethanol might be a valuable technology, but I don't think I have any interest in working on any project that might be applied to corn.
We'll see. I actually have an appointment with my adviser tomorrow afternoon to talk about this stuff. We'll see if he can convince me of the error of my ways; if not, I'll be trying to twist his work into something cooler, or I'll have to find another lab. I'll let you know. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| Every once in a while you come across something that just seems absolutely, uncompromisingly *right*. I was going to post a few more links up here to web sites of some interesting organizations tell y'all to take a peek, and move on with my day. Instead, I decided to poke around The Land Institute for a moment and see what they'd put up recently.
I first heard about The Land Institute from a book, Biomimicry, which spent a chapter or two describing the Institute's attempts to rebuild modern agriculture sustainably, without heavy external inputs of machinery, fertilizers, and pesticides. Very interesting stuff, even at such a low level. But they've got some pretty interesting people there at the Land Instititue, and work with some other very interesting people, among them Wendell Berry. One particular conversation between Berry and the Institute's Wes Jackson resulted in this essay, Toward An Ignorance-Based World View.
Please, read it. Today, if at all possible. Tomorrow, if you must. Don't finish this post - stop right here, follow the link and read it.
While these ideas are not completely unique, and the idea of maintaining a sense of ignorance in the hard sciences has been supported elsewhere (such as in this brief essay in Science ), Jackson presents it the most pervasive, convincing, was I have seen. And he is absolutely right. I can't claim that he's got every fact straight, or that I agree with every point he makes, but the major argument of the paper - that each and every one of us must maintain an awareness of both our personal and societal ignorance of this world and the inherent wonder and mystery that that allows.
In effect, Jackson is arguing that understanding and building a civilization based on resilience, sustainability, and local community is not only morally and spiritually imperative, but logical and scientific as well. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| It's snowing again!
I had a hard time believing the natives here that I would eventually get tired of the snow this winter, but I think I can see their point now. It's never enough snow to really have any fun - just an inch or two at a time - and really, things are much more pleasant when it's bright and sunny and 10 degrees than cloudy and 20. Oh, well - at least the sun does come out occasionally, which is making this winter much more cheerful that it might be otherwise. Sunrise at 8:10 am is still too dang late, though.
I mentioned putting up some links to good environment/business/sustainability/science type news services, journals, etc. I've been keeping a Firefox window full of these things for two weeks now, and one of these days I'm going to forget and lose them (bookmarks are for wusses). So I'm going to link them here instead, so that I log in more, and as a service to the masses.
PNAS Sustainability section
PNAS, the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, recently added a section devoted to sustainability to their journal - alongside chemistry, biology, medicine, etc. For those of you with academic access to papers, it's definitely a good place to poke around if you're curious about super-current research.
Sustainability at the National Academies
This site at the National Academies links to a couple of more in-depth reports on topics like drinking water, biofuels, and ecosystem services. Read these if you know you're interested in a particular topic, or have an extra hour on your hands. They also have a monthly newsletter with abstracts and links to recent government reports.
Science and Development Network
This looks like a very accessible site with news stories on the role and implementation of science in developing countries, with an emphasis on public health and environmental issues. A very well-designed site, easily searchable for news on many dozens of topics.
The Guardian Environment Network
Like PNAS, the Guardian is expanding its online coverage of environmental/science news. This page links to "the best environment sites on the web", as well as to a few particularly significant individual news stories from the past week or so. Of course, the first on the list is The Guardian's own environmental news site. Probably the most approachable of the sources I've linked here.
And just to throw some details out there, I've recently come across a cool chart on the cost-effectiveness of buying a hybrid car, and a rather sobering report from a normally business-friendly source on BPA, that chemical in plastics that everyone's been so worried about.
Anyway, I don't expect any of you to read all that (I haven't!), but I would absolutely love to have a conversation about any of this stuff if you do poke around those sites. And of course, if you have another reliable and interesting website for environmental/sustainability science and news, let me know! | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| And I'm posting! I don't know how long this will last, but in an effort to actually keep in touch with cool people who are important to me, I'll give LJ another shot.
So what's happening? Here's a quick run-down:
Starting semester #2 of graduate school, which so far is pretty awesome. I missed school! The midwest isn't nearly as scary as I feared it would be, though I need not to live in the shittiest neighborhood around. I'm definitely thankful I applied last year, since I know several people (far smarter than I am) who are having a hard time with that this year, what with the recession and all. While I'm feeling less confident about my specific direction now than I was last September, I have a much better sense that I'm in the right place to do something good. You know, with the saving of the world via holistic systems thinking and biomimicry and life cycle analysis and stuff. Maybe with some bioengineering thrown in. Maybe. The more I read, the more I think "gee, it can't be *that* hard to make a system/world/thing less broken that this one!"
I am also very hungry, largely due to spending the last half hour browsing for recipes for my new slow cooker. Food Network as a - literally - mouth-watering compilation that makes me want to get up early tomorrow to start something tasty...
Hmm, school, food... what else matters? President Barack Obama! I listen to Pandora radio a lot. Oh, yeah, I'm sort of mostly dating this girl... it's an odd situation, and things may be dissipating, but she is pretty cool, even if she is a sociologist and a Christian.
I plan to post a bunch of links to good news resources for science/technology/environment type stuff. Partly so I don't lose it, also because I completely geek out over it, and want to spread the procrastination (love).
So, um, how are y'all doing? | | comments: 15 comments or Leave a comment |
| |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
ike's journal
tired
hot